Pawn Sacrifice

Review by Candice Lee Catullo

Based on the true story of chess prodigy Bobby Fischer, PAWN SACRIFICE is a calculated portrait of the legend both on and off the chessboard. Bobby Fischer was a chess super star – a rare breed if there ever was one. He achieved celebrity status in 1972, widely considered to be the best player of all time even today.

The movie begins with a young Bobby, living in Brooklyn. He was a natural from the beginning. Just a young boy, he sat in his room playing chess against himself. Bobby played so much and so intently, that his mother took him to a psychiatrist. And that was the foundation for Bobby’s life.

The Great Gatsby

Review by Pamela Zoslov

The news that Australian director Baz Luhrmann was making yet another adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY raised a familiar dread. What would the tasteless showman responsible for MOULIN ROUGE do to Fitzgerald's slender, elegiac Jazz Age novel? The trailer for the film, a high-decibel mash-up featuring a robotic version of that well known 1920s ditty “So Happy Together” by the Turtles, did little to reassure me about what would certainly be an ugly assault on literature – “The Great Ghastly.” And in 3D, no less.

It's easy to feel protective about Fitzgerald, a writer too fragile to live very long. I was dismayed in 2008 that a delicate short story like “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” had been inflated by David Fincher into a massive special-effects epic. Gatsby occupies an even more special place in American literature. Familiar to every schoolchild, it has been called the “great” novel everyone has read, in comparison to Ulysses, the “great” novel no one has read.